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Warming up a 2019-era (Intel) MacBook Pro was never my problem. Quite the opposite. Those machines ran notoriously hot. The later macOS releases, combined with
by smarks 4mo ago
Warming up a 2019-era (Intel) MacBook Pro was never my problem. Quite the opposite. Those machines ran notoriously hot. The later macOS releases, combined with company-mandated crapware, made it worse. Doing an ordinary build or starting a videoconferencing session was enough to cause the fans to run. On a warm day the fans couldn’t shed enough heat and so the system would go into thermal throttling. The OS would occupy a core with a 100% kernel_task that didn’t do any work but which would serve to prevent actual work from being scheduled onto that core. When four or five out of the six cores were occupied by kernel_task, I knew I was in for a bag of hurt (to steal a phrase from Steve Jobs). Responsiveness went completely to hell. The machine became effectively unusable.
After a while my normal procedure was to run with the thing sitting on top of an ice pack. That would let me run a 60-90 minute video conference without troubles.
The only redeeming feature of these machines is that they could emulate old x86 hardware at speed. That allowed me to run old apps on old OSes without having to keep old hardware running.
- recursivecaveat 4mo agoMy Intel MBP would noticeably raise the whole room's temperature, while the fans ran so loud. We had some corporate security software that would occasionally go haywire and lock up 100% of a core until you rebooted. If you got that at the same time as a video call it would become too physically painful to touch any part of the metal body with bare skin.
- alexwwang 4mo agoMaybe the same type. Each time I call the LLM api the fan starts to work and make big noise. The temperature in the room is going up noticeably for 1-2 degrees.
- embedding-shape 4mo ago> Each time I call the LLM api the fan starts to work and make big noise So every time you do HTTP calls? Nothing there should spin up your fans, unless you use an agent with an horribly broken TUI, I've heard there is a few of those out there. But remotely calling LLM APIs really shouldn't be taxing on your local device, something somewhere is wrong/bad if that's what you're seeing.
- alexwwang 4mo agoIf the horribly broken TUI you mentioned is OpenCode, I’d say yes. That’s exactly what I am experiencing.
- embedding-shape 4mo agoSure, if that's what you're using, then that's definitively buggy, unless it's doing compilation or something actually using your resources, just making HTTP calls shouldn't be heavy for your computer. Claude Code was mainly what I was thinking about, as it similarly broken, but I'm sure there are more out there as most of them seem vibe-coded at best.
- alexwwang 4mo agoYes. Whatever *code, the same when they are working. The node.js backend is awful.
- Filligree 4mo agoIs it a local LLM? Sibling seems to be assuming remote, but I have trouble imagining a TUI that inefficient.
- reitzensteinm 4mo agoI had Windows and Mac laptops back then, and the HN snobbishness around the superiority of the Mac was genuinely baffling. My i9 2019 MBP with discrete graphics was probably the worst laptop purchase I ever made. Docking it to an external monitor would enable the GPU, so even when idling it would run the fans and drain the battery. I’d read cautionary tales about Windows laptops being pulled out of backpacks scorching hot as they failed to shut down. But that happened to my Mac all the time, too. The M series though is incredible. I can’t imagine buying a Windows laptop now.
- pja 4mo agoThe i9 was notorious. Would thermally throttle almost instantly & for any sizeable build job would end up slower than the i7 IIRC. Intel really made themselves unpopular with Apple during that period.
- close04 4mo ago> Intel really made themselves unpopular with Apple during that period. Intel just reenacted IBM's history with Apple, particularly the G5 era. That CPU was instantly a no-go for anything mobile. In workstations it was cranked ever higher with very poor power-frequency scaling, needing water cooling for the beastly 200W idle power consumption and close to 1kW full throttle. That went well so was a perfect role model for Intel's i9.
- aeyes 4mo ago> Intel really made themselves unpopular with Apple during that period. You can't tell me that this wasn't known by Apple before shipping the product. Why did they not provide adequate cooling for the CPU?
- pja 4mo agoThis was a laptop, so cooling was very constrained. The fans can only be so big & you can only shift so much air in & out of a MacBook. I presume Apple knew perfectly well but wanted the halo product to sell to those people who will always pay extra for the perceived “top of the line” product. Once Intel branding had created an i9 that was a bigger number than an i7, then Apple was going to sell it. It was faster than the i7 after all: just not for very long! My entirely speculative theory is that the poor thermal characteristics of that era of Intel CPUs didn’t really become apparent until quite late in the development process & by that point Apple had probably committed to buying a fair chunk of Intel’s output.
- blackoil 4mo agoThose were John Ive era laptops where form ruled function. Poor thermal, less ports, less keys were all features.
- philistine 4mo agoForm always ruled function with Jony Ive, but he always had a good eye for the way compromises shook out. During that era, Ive was creatively checked out but Cook kept him on to maintain the stock price.
- jorgeleo 4mo agoi decided to do an experiment and try to run an LLM in my old 2013 MBP. i7, 16 gb mem, 1 tb hd. Installed Linux mint Xfce Edition for lightness, installed ollama, start to test different models. Gemma4 e4b runs perfectly fine, exposed it to the network, connected to it with my current notebook and use vs code codex to start to run inference. For about 30 minutes of bliss, this setup work at a reasonable speed... then the MBP shut it self down. It was so hot that it trigger the safety mechanism, the fans sounded like the laptop was about to take off. I though on leaving it on inside the fridge, but then the WIFI wouldn't reach. On the other hand, my wife saw all this and offer to buy me an M5... the experiment didn't work as intended, but it did work.
- tacomagick 4mo agoCould be in need of a thermal paste refresh etc.?
- jorgeleo 4mo agoand redo the thermal paste
- bartread 4mo agoOn a laptop that old it might be worth opening it up to blow all the dust out with a compressor or air duster. I’ve often found that to work wonders on old MacBook Pros. The other issue is that unless the battery has been replaced relatively recently its charging efficiency may not be that great and the high load being placed on it might be causing it to get hotter than it would have done when new.